What Do You Do When the Ilegal is a Child?

I seldom write on political issues because I think everyone is entitled to his/her opinions.  In our politically polarized society, civil discourse is, sadly, a lost art.  The concept of the loyal and honorable opposition no long exists, and if you find yourself on the opposite side of an issue from a friend, at the end of any political discussion that friendship may be a casualty.  All of that said, I'm writing about the crisis of unaccompanied, illegal, alien children coming across the Southwestern borders of the United States.  Everyone in the world has weighed in on this mess, so since I've been thinking about it, I decided to risk offending my readership with my opinions.

First, let's talk about the facts.  The US Naturalization and Immigration Agency along with Homeland Security projects between 60,000 and 90,000 illegal, alien children will arrive at the borders this year. Those numbers more than double the children who arrived at the borders last year.    This year 57,000 of these children have already arrived illegally at the borders, mainly in Texas and Arizona.  The majority of the 57,000 are unaccompanied and from the three poorest and most violent countries in Central America:  El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

This huge influx of illegal immigrants has backed up the legal system for dealing with people caught trying to immigrate to the US illegally.  This back-up is particularly difficult since these are children languishing in packed detention centers awaiting the legal hearing they are entitled to as provided in a 2008 immigration law.  Basically, the system is overwhelmed.  The citizens of the towns and counties, which will become the instant home of any of these children granted asylum, are up in arms.  They remember much too clearly how their social services, health care systems, and schools systems were overwhelmed during the height of illegal immigration in the 1990's.  And, if that isn't enough, every Tom, Dick and Harry along with the Pope have weighed in with inflammatory, polarized, invective.  I've been reading both sides, and the one thing in common is the objectification of these children.  By objectification, I mean that both sides are writing, talking and acting as if these kids are just the great, unwashed, unwanted, problem whose primary function is to thrust the immigration issue to the forefront of the American public.

Here's what I think they are:  Individual kids whose desperate parents were willing to entrust each of them to some of the sleaziest people on this earth (coyotes), paying these sleazeballs with money they can ill afford in a last ditch effort to let their child escape a no hope, violent situation.  I was immediately struck by the parallel of the European Jews trying to find ways for their children to escape Nazi Germany in the late 1930's.  The endless, and rapid discussion of misguided thinking on the part of the Central American parents attempting to get their children to the USA by any means thinking it assures them a better life is just a blame game and a further way to turn kids into dirty, smelly objects.  On the other hand, the bleeding hearts who would instantly wave a wand and grant asylum to each and every child don't really care what happens to them as long as they don't have to look at them in detention anymore.

What we really have here are frightened kids.  They most likely can't speak English, and many won't be able to read even in Spanish.  The food being given is different and upsetting.  Nothing is familiar and they are very unsure and oh, let's say, 'acting out'.  I'm sure most of them cry quite a bit for their mothers.  They are wearing torn and tattered clothing and shoes.  And some of these kids are sick from the minor to the serious.  They don't know what is going to happen not only from day to day but also from hour to hour.  Imagine your 10 year old facing that.

I know what I think should happen legally to these kids, and I'm sure you have your opinion too.   However, one thing I'm very clear on is out rich, religious (how we describe OURSELVES) country needs to step up and alleviate a situation where kids are scared, sick, and needy.  We can sort out the legality issues later when no one is crying.

If you are a member of a Methodist Church, there are relief efforts you can support both in goods and donations.  If your not a member of a church and want to help, just call a church and they will direct you.  While the Methodists don't have an exclusive on providing help,  UMCOR, the relief arm of the Methodist Church, has a long and honorable history of providing relief during disasters.

If you are one of my readers, and a member of St. Paul UMC, the Mary Martha Classroom is just awaiting your contribution:  All you have to do is walk your new items into their classroom.  They'll do the delivery for you.  If you haven't seen the list, here it is:

Women -

Cotton Underwear sizes 5 and under

Hygiene Products (sanitary napkins, no tampons)

Pants - Women’s small sizes

Tennis Shoes - Women’s sizes 6, 6.5 & 7

Children -

Baby Toiletries (infant to toddler)

Blankets

Cotton Underwear for Children

Disposable diapers & wipes

Nido Baby Formula/Powered Milk

Tennis Shoes Children’s sizes 2-12

Other Items -

Easy open juices

Easy open snacks

Reading Glasses

Rebozos (baby sling/wraps)

Small Backpacks

Small towels

Trash Bags

Watches

Central Texas Conference churches are invited to collect these items and deliver them to Ridglea UMC on July 23 between 3:00pm - 7:00 pm.

                                                  Ridglea UMC

                                                  6036 Locke Avenue

                                                  Fort Worth, TX 76116

History of the Computer - the museum

We keep going places, and I keep trying to get caught up in writing about them.  (Actually, I have a little case of writer's block.) The most interesting destination this month (so far) is the Computer History Museum.  It's located south of San Francisco smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley close to the Google campus.  It was a surprise to me Google headquarters isn't a building, it's several buildings in a campus like setting.  We also passed the Facebook headquarters.  I laughed as we drove by since the Facebook address is:  "One Hacker Way".  Really.

Marker 'posts' 

The Computer History Museum is in a Bauhaus style modern building of curved glass.  It's the only museum I've ever been to where the exhibits are in numbered sections.  The curators did everything except paint a dotted line on the floor for the patrons to walk on.  Naturally, the museum is laid out chronologically.  "Computing" originally meant arithmetic as it related to buying and selling goods as well as building and ocean navigation.  Gradually it came to include scientific application particularly in astronomy.  The abacus was woefully inadequate in handling complex math which required intensive and extensive arithmetic and mathematics.  The following picture shows a promotional product which I thought was hilarious.  Most people don't remember that the electronic calculator is only about 40 years old, and it was the basis of Hewlett Packard.  In 1970 HP offered a $395 hand held electronic calculator based on the Texas Instruments transistor.  It could perform scientific functions. By 1980 anybody could buy a hand held calculator for $10.

  I was fascinated by this museum on lots of levels.  First, it helped me understand that the Electronic Revolution (or whatever it winds up being called in 50 years).  It has had many of the same societal impacts as the Industrial Revolution.  There's been the same rapid pace of change, the seemingly inexhaustible number of new inventions,  new products and applications as a result of research and development.  Electronics has transformed the economic base of  every society around the world with winners and losers inside each economy.  To illustrate - the first computers arose out of the universities and were used for scientific purposes of calculation.  Governmental research and development centered on national defense and missile guidance.  Business and personal usage followed behind both of these.

Early computers were powered by thousands of vacuum tubes linked with miles of wire.  The most famous of these early ones is Eniac, but the Johnniac (same era) was more fun to see.

The Johnniac

It's hard to imagine computers the size of rooms which generated so much heat they had to be placed on elevated floors so air could circulate underneath, and in sealed rooms to eliminate contamination from dust and smoke and whatever.  The 1957 "Desk Set" movie's version of a computer wasn't too far off the mark.  For those of you who have never seen a vacuum tube, this is what they look like up close.  The Eniac and the Johnniac were scientific computers with memories of 1024 words.  (One character = 8 bytes.)

vacuum tubes connected with wires

You fed information you wanted the machine to calculate via punch cards which was the program. Punch cards and punch card operators were an early job casualty of the computer business.

To develop a computer to be used for business, IBM sequestered a group of engineers in a motel for months in order to reduce distractions, so they could conceive of a computer which could be built afford-ably, installed quickly, and be used by businesses for accounting and inventory purposes.  They developed the IBM 1401.

This machine was in its own room since volunteers at the Computer Museum were restoring it to working order.   This is the first machine Drake worked with professionally.  It was operated around the clock by Computer Operators (another job casualty) whose jobs were to feed punch card programs into the machine and keep all the tubes and parts functioning.  Suddenly, corporations had Data Processing Departments with employees who spoke a totally different language and performed magic which was not understood by anyone else in the company.  Drake was one of those people.  Seeing this machine was a waltz down memory lane for Drake.

  The IBM 1401 was introduced by a self-produced movie to the business world.  Unfortunately, there was only one working 1401 at the time.  IBM engineers were afraid to move it to make the movie because they weren't sure it would work if it was relocated.   The IBMer's solved the problem by making the machine in the movie a mock-up with IBM engineers standing behind the giant magnetic tape decks twirling them by hand to simulate the 'computer' running.  This monstrosity weighed 9000 pounds, had 5 miles of wire in it, contained 10,600 transistors, and was the size of a one car garage.  It went on the market in mid 1960 and had an amazing amount of memory: 16,000 bytes.  To give some perspective, I have a 32 gigabyte iphone.  ONE gigabyte is one billion bytes and my iphone has 32 times that much.  See what I mean by rapid change?  The IBM 1401 was a wild success.  It accounted for approximately one-half of all the computers in the world - all 50,000 of them in 1965.  Because Drake could relate personally to this machine, it brought home to me the tremendous impact of computers on our society in only 50 short years.

There are twenty 'sign posts' in the Computer History Museum.  We saw everything in detailed minutiae.  One of the highlights were the early desk tops, and I discovered WHY the first personal computers were designed with a keyboard, computer screen that looked like a small TV, on top of a processing 'tower'.  The very first personal computers were individually built at home by a few engineers and scientists.  This one was built by a Xerox engineer, (with wooden cases) for his personal use at home.  His vision of what a home computer should look like is what eventually became the standard for the desk top computer.  

One of the twenty 'stations' in the museum was Gaming.  There was even a 'pong' machine that was interactive - and yes, I'm still horrible at pong.  Those silver knobs were the controls.  The gaming screen consisted of just what you see - a line and two 'pongs'.

 I could go on and on.  We were here for about 3 hours, and I took over 300 pictures (of course).  If you want to see more, click on the link:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/115478608971584948192/albums/6036459133644053793?authkey=CNndgpWltNjEGw